Love Me Like A Rock (3 page)

“Ahh, this is…I was gonna ask you out for coffee,” Sean panted, face red as Austin experimented with his grip on Sean’s dick.

“You did. Coffee later,” Austin muttered and tugged Sean’s face down to his.

That peppermint scent surrounded him again and he expected to taste it in Sean’s mouth, but didn’t. Not until Sean pulled away just long enough to drag his mouth down to Austin’s neck and fasten tight, tripping every hell-yeah switch in Austin’s body, did the peppermint source reveal itself.

Sean’s hair radiated the fresh, clean smell and Austin pressed his face against it, breathing deep.

“God, you smell good. Makes me wanna eat you up.”

“Back atcha,” said Sean as he started to sink to his knees.

Austin grabbed at Sean’s thick arms and hauled him back up.

“No, like this.” The novelty of it was too much of a turn-on. Austin was used to being face to chest or face to belly with guys who were towered over him. But Sean was only a little taller than him and being able to kiss him and rub their dicks together was a weird kind of thrill he hadn’t known he’d been missing.

“Okay, but this isn’t gonna be fancy.”

“Don’t need fancy.”

Sean wrapped his hand around both of them and held on so tight Austin got dizzy. This wasn’t the kind of thing he and Vinnie had ever been able to do, not with the foot difference in their heights.

God. Get him the fuck out of your head.

Fucking into someone’s hand up against the wall was a brand-new experience for him and it deserved all his fucking attention. Especially when Sean leaned back against the wall, spread his legs and sank down an inch or two, bringing them into perfect alignment.

Austin slapped a hand flat to the wall at Sean’s shoulder and dug his forehead into Sean’s chest. Heat was building in his balls, the muscles of his arms and legs straining as he stood frozen. Except for his hips, which couldn’t help moving.

When he came, it caught him by surprise. A sharp burst of heat flashing from the base of his spine and shooting out the tip of his dick and a sudden surge that left him groaning.

Austin flopped against Sean’s shoulder, breath heaving, as Sean reached for himself.

No way. That’s mine.

He slapped Sean’s hand away, bracing a forearm across Sean’s chest to hold him in place. Austin’s hand was extra slick when he fumbled for Sean’s cock, gripping him tight and stripping an orgasm out of him in a few hard strokes.

When Sean shouted and sagged against the wall, Austin eased him down to the floor, where they collapsed in the tangle of their own clothes.

“Wow. You’re pretty strong.”

“For a little guy?”

“For anyone,” Sean said, frowning at him and stepping hard on Austin’s guilt button. The faint light caught on the downward curve of his lips. “Do you lift?”

Overreact much?
“Yeah.”

“I can tell.”

To make up for jumping down Sean’s throat—
hmm, down Sean’s throat…just where I want to be
—Austin explained, after clearing his brain. Seriously, it was like Sean had flicked some kind of porno switch in him, the way his thoughts couldn’t stay off of sex for more than three seconds at a time. “I need to be part of the team. Not just the guy who shows up on the water and yells at them. So I work out with them too, although they bitch about every ounce of muscle I have being a drag on the boat.”

“Well, it looks good on you,” Sean said and ran a fingertip from Austin’s shoulder to his wrist, and talk about drag. The tug of that fingertip against his sweaty skin, sketching down his biceps to his elbow and forearm was something Austin felt in his balls. Suddenly he was too naked and too sober and in too weird a place to relax.

He’d been thinking about hooking up with someone, but had meant it to be anonymous. Banging a guy he had better than even odds of seeing naked with one of his professors in the room for the rest of the year wasn’t part of the plan.

He shivered and rolled away from Sean’s arm and onto his feet. “I gotta go.”

Chapter Three

He meant it to be a one-time thing.

But somehow Austin had put Sean’s number into his contacts on his phone before they’d left the studio. Sean had stopped him as they were heading out the door, disheveled still and sweaty under their coats, pressing Austin into the wall and digging a knee between his thighs to pin him while Sean kissed him senseless. Austin was rocking on that hard thigh and seriously considering ducking behind the changing screen for round two when Sean sucked one last mark on the side of his neck and let him go, skin stinging with desire.

“You should call me,” he said, “and I’ll buy you that cup of coffee.” Then Sean slipped out the door.

By the time Austin pulled the pieces of himself together and followed, the hallway was empty, no sign or sound of Sean in the empty art building.

Those digits burned a hole in his phone, sitting there, waiting for Austin to slip and accidentally call the guy at the other end of that contact.

Austin only knew where his phone was about half the time. It drove Vinnie crazy how careless Austin was with the thing, and how difficult he was to get ahold of when he was deep in an art project or simply getting high and mellowing out in his room. Vinnie, who was never more than a couple of feet from his phone, and had it programmed with dozens of different alerts and alarms, couldn’t understand how the hell Austin could walk out the door and be gone for hours without remembering to take his phone with him.

I only go about three places on campus,
Austin had argued.
I’m at the boathouse, the art building, or in our suite. It’s not that hard to find me.

Plus, someone nearby always had a phone he could borrow, and Vinnie’s number was one he’d memorized the day they’d met during the first week of boarding school. If he needed anything, Vinnie would help him.

But now…now Austin was starting to wonder if his phone was going to give him cancer of the hand, he’d kept it so tightly handcuffed to him since the surprise banging session in the drawing studio. He couldn’t help it. Sean had put himself in Austin’s phone with his full name and a split-second selfie of him with flushed cheeks and red lips.

Austin, who never met a bit of trivia he didn’t like, was a Google addict.

It was dumb. He knew it was a terrible idea to Google stalk the guy he couldn’t pry out of his thoughts during downtime. Between practice and class and working on his independent study project for his art major, there wasn’t a lot of downtime, period. But what there was, was filled with memories of big hands and feet and curly red body hair and a dick that deserved monuments built to it.

So he Google stalked.

Actually, since his first hit on Sean’s name was an Instagram account, he’d pretty much stopped there. Because Sean was clearly as hooked on that app as Austin was on Google.

Not big on the selfies, that Sean, which was a shame. Austin wished there were more pictures of the man. But Sean had a fine eye for the pastoral landscape, wildlife and weird graffiti, which was found in all kinds of wilderness spaces, apparently.

Sean also made disgusting Jell-O-based combinations at the salad bar and proudly shared them, which was so fucking cute Austin couldn’t stop grinning every time he spotted one as he scrolled through Sean’s pics.

Austin went to practice and class, worked on some paintings that didn’t do anything for him, and took out his phone multiple times an hour, pulling up Sean’s contact and pausing with his thumb over the call icon.

Almost a week after their post-drawing session hookup, Sean stopped waiting for him. Austin was actually staring right at his phone, debating for the seven hundredth time whether or not to call when the screen lit up with a text notification.

Want to meet for coffee? A drink? Terrible pizza at the campus center?

Austin snorted, amused despite himself. Carlisle’s campus center was notorious for serving the kind of pizza kids from public schools had eaten in their cafeterias since grade school. Those students were split evenly between bitching that the campus center was stuck in a time warp and enjoying the nostalgia for childhood in their world of adult(ish) freedom on campus.

Austin, who’d been in private school since kindergarten, had tasted it once, found it to be some weird non-human food object, and declared it delicious. Vinnie had rolled his eyes at that so hard he’d practically sprained them.

Before he could talk himself out of it, Austin answered.

Pizza it is. Meet you there?

Finishing up some grading. Pick me up at Prospect? I’m in 408.

Sure. Pick him up. At his room. Prospect was actually on the way to the campus center, so that made perfect sense. Would have been silly to walk right past the grad student dorm and wait for Sean at the snack bar.

It was just convenient for them to meet at Sean’s room.

But when he showed up at Sean’s door—reception security in Sean’s dorm was way more lax than Austin’s and the girl had waved him up the stairs without even glancing at the phone to call first—his heart was pounding and his breath came fast, drying his mouth.

He blamed his sprint up the stairs, without allowing himself to wonder why exactly he was sprinting.

The door opened almost as soon as his hand lifted from the first knock.

“Hey,” Sean said.

The surge of
WANT
blew through Austin’s good intentions like a tornado through a cornfield. Before he could deny himself, he pushed through the doorway and into Sean’s body, grabbing his face with two hands and pulling it down until their mouths met and delved deep.

“Door,” Sean muttered, and Austin kicked it closed, pushing them toward the bed in the corner of the room. He’d look around later.

They were naked and tangled up in each other on Sean’s skinny bed inside of two minutes. Austin’s body had gotten most of the way revved up on the walk over, and he humped against Sean’s hands and legs and any other body part he could trap between his legs. The smell of peppermint rose from Sean’s entire body this time. Austin was pretty sure that was going to be a permanent hard-on trigger for him from now on.

“God, what do you wash with? Peppermint candy?” He breathed deep, tasting the fresh minty scent in his mouth.

“Dr. Bronner’s.” Whatever that was.

“Yummy.” He nosed his way to that spot under Sean’s jaw where a racing pulse thundered against his mouth, sucking at the skin until Sean groaned and fucked against Austin’s hip with his dick.

Sean pushed Austin flat against the mattress and pressed his wrists down. He licked a stripe up the side of Austin’s neck, finishing with a bite to his earlobe. “Tell me what you want.”

Austin wasn’t feeling picky. “Somebody’s dick in somebody’s ass, and I don’t care which way it goes.”

Sean slapped him on the knee. “Up. Me in you. I’ll wrap up.”

Austin’s knees were up and his mouth was working before he had a chance to stop it, which was becoming a disconcerting habit around Sean.

“I’ve been screwing around with one guy for the last couple of years, waiting for him to get his head out of his ass. And I know he hasn’t fucked anyone else in years, although blowjobs are possible.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m just saying, if you’ve been tested, we can do it without.” He flicked a glance at the condom packets Sean had fumbled out of his dresser drawer with one hand as they’d lunged past it.

“I’m negative. Got tested after my last boyfriend and I broke up. Slept with a friend on the survey of the summer, but we used condoms and I haven’t slept with anyone else since. I’ve been trying to get this one guy’s attention.” Sean’s grin flashed over his face as Austin’s cheeks heated at the reminder of how long Sean had been interested in him.

He didn’t go bare often. Hardly ever, in fact, because Vinnie was a neat freak who hated the idea of the messiness of condomless sex. But they’d gotten caught up in the moment once or twice and done it without. Vinnie prioritized sex somewhere like forty-seventh on his to-do list, so he wasn’t exactly out there whoring around. Austin knew about every fuck or suck Vinnie had ever had since they were fourteen and skinny boarding-school freshmen together, and almost all of them were with him.

And that slide of skin on skin…the extra heat, the slipperiness. Yes, he’d loved fucking without a condom, and the idea of using one with Sean made his lip curl up with meh. If he had to, he would, obviously. But there were worse things in the world than trusting someone to be honest with you, and Sean had been the first one to make himself vulnerable by confessing his interest. Austin didn’t think he’d bullshit him now.

Before he had a chance to say, “Do it,” though, Sean was shaking his head.

“Wrong time to make this call. Not thinking straight,” he said, grunting at the touch of his own hand on his dick as he rolled the condom on. “Figure that out later. Next time.”

Which was all kinds of assumptions that made Austin tense up, until Sean worked his way down Austin’s belly with a hot, open mouth. Sucking and fingering him until Austin braced his feet on the mattress, Sean brought him so close to the edge Austin had to yank on his hair to pull him off before he spilled.

The slow slide of Sean’s dick into his ass had him fisting his hands in the sheets. He meant to hang on, to sink deep and enjoy it, but he hadn’t gotten far enough away from that edge. As soon as Sean braced himself on an elbow and thrust deep, one hand wrapped around Austin’s dick, Austin was tripping and falling over the edge, biting his wrist to keep his shout muffled. His legs fell to the bed as final tremors shook him while Sean dropped his forehead to Austin’s shoulder and fucked into him hard and fast.

Sean’s final thrust pushed Austin’s head against the wall as he came, groaning through clenched teeth. His body fell heavy against Austin’s, making breathing an issue. Austin pushed against a sweaty shoulder and Sean slid off him to the side.

“Ow.” Between the wall and the sudden removal of Sean’s dick from his ass, Austin felt entitled to a minor complaint.

“Sorry.” Pulling Austin on top of him, Sean rolled beneath him, skin sliding wetly where their bellies touched. He reached down and removed the condom, dropping it over the edge of the bed into what Austin hoped was a convenient trash can.

Austin let his breathing slow, draped on top of Sean’s furnace of a body and sweating with his own racing heartbeat.

When he lifted his head to make sure the man underneath him was still conscious, Austin was surprised again to find his face almost on a level with Sean’s. He really had gotten so used to fooling around with Vinnie, it still caught him off guard to realize he was almost the same height as Sean. A few inches shorter, but just enough to make it easy to tuck his head under the man’s chin.

With Vinnie, he sometimes felt like a bug crawling across the windshield of a Rolls Royce.

Okay, how ’bout we let that metaphor up for some air?

He laughed at himself and his snort woke Sean up. Austin held on while Sean stretched, arms over his head and his legs pointing off the bed. It was like trying to stay seated on a pony, a rollicking sensation that immediately flashed Austin back to his childhood and his favorite fat little pony at the stables where his parents boarded their show jumpers.

The same post-sex emotional fallout as the first time hit him a few minutes later, leaving Austin drumming his fingertips against Sean’s chest. The snuggling thing was making him antsy, which was strange, considering how intimate he’d been with this relative stranger twice now. “We really ought to go out.”

“Soon. Relax.” Sean stroked his fingers through Austin’s hair, pulling the curls straight and then letting them bounce back. He heaved a sigh, sounding stupidly content. “It is not possible you have the energy to get up and get dressed right now.”

“True. But I didn’t mean to derail your plans.”
Holy shit. Could you be a bigger dork?

“My plans were to ply you with cheap beer and shitty pizza until I could talk you into coming back here and getting naked.” Sean tilted Austin’s chin up until they were looking at each other and kissed him slowly on the mouth. “That’s pretty much all I’ve been able to think about since last week.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. So maybe you let some of that tension go and relax, okay?”

Relaxation was not Austin’s natural state. He relied upon racing and art to do that, with a low-level pot high as his backup strategy. Being a hyperactive monkey boy wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to confess while he was enjoying the warm glow of Sean’s admiration.

But he could confess something else.

“This is a little weird for me.”

“What? Hooking up?”

He couldn’t say that, exactly, since he’d gone off on the occasional tear when feeling neglected by Vinnie. “Hooking up and sticking around for conversation with someone who’s basically a stranger.”

“So let’s not be strangers.” Sean touched the tip of Austin’s nose with one finger. “Ask me anything.”

Austin’s brain went entirely blank. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to know other than,
Why do you like me so much when I can’t get the guy I want to pay attention to me at all?
“Favorite music?”

“Simon and Garfunkel,” Sean answered without hesitation.

Austin flinched. “Excuse me? Were you raised by my grandmother?”

Sean laughed and the way the corner of his eyes wrinkled up made Austin want to lick the smile right off his face. “You’re cute.”

“I seriously don’t think we can be friends,” Austin said, grumpy now, because some day, just once, he wanted to be the hot one. The fuckable one.

“What’s the frown for?”

“What?” No way. It was too stupid for actual words.

“Tell me.” And Sean, the cheating bastard, pulled Austin closer, rubbing his dick against Austin’s still sensitive length until they shivered.

“Gah. It’s like you can suck the thoughts right out of my head with your dick. I’m totally screwed here, aren’t I?” How could he be getting hard again already?

“Did you think mentioning my dick was going to distract me?”